Life on the Edge

Life on the Edge

More than four decades ago, Michael Harrington held a mirror
up to Americas self-image of affluence with his searing
picture of poverty, The Other America. Harringtons
book was read widelyby President John Kennedy, among
othersand fueled the moral and intellectual resolve behind
the 1960s "war on poverty."

After two decades of a mean-spirited "war on the
poor," followed by invisibility and neglect, its hard
to imagine a book about poverty commanding the same attention
today. But Barbara Ehrenreichs compelling personal
narrative Nickel and Dimed has remained on best-seller
lists for more than two years. Those who admired Nickel and
Dimed will find that David K. Shiplers The Working
Poor: Invisible in America takes the narrative to new
heights.

The Working Poor is a compassionate and no-nonsense
look into the lives of Americas working poor. Shipler is a
gifted journalist whos known for tackling tough topics,
including in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Arab and Jew:
Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land. He brings his talents to
dramatizing the invisible experiences of the estimated 35 million
Americans who live in poverty.

Shipler doesnt try to shoehorn his narratives into an
established framework about poverty. His profiles capture the
complex interaction of personal and economic structural forces
that contribute to poverty. He spent years getting to know some
of his subjects and their circumstances, taking us beyond glib
and sweeping theories as their lives and voices speak for
themselves. The Working Poor works with an ambitious
canvas that includes North Carolina migrant worker camps, big
city job-training programs, and Los Angeles garment sweatshops.

Shiplers multidimensional writing takes us into the
lives of women like Leary Brock, who moves from a crack-ravaged
life on the streets of Washington, D.C., to drug treatment, to a
tough-love job-training program and a job with mobility at Xerox.
But we also encounter economically precarious sweatshop owners,
restaurant managers, social workers, and farmers who are only one
rung up the economic ladder from the low-wage workers they employ
or counsel.

Some of these portraits are incredibly moving, such as
Shiplers description of the King family, a working poor
family with abundant spirit from Claremont, New Hampshire.
Shipler writes, "The fragile life of Tom and Kara King fell
apart piece by piece until nothing was left but love and
loyalty." With little financial reserves, the Kings and
their three children hit bottom when Kara was diagnosed with
cancer. Kinship, Shipler observes, "can blunt the edge of
economic adversity. When a grandmother takes the children after
school, when a friend lends a car, when a church provides day
care and a sense of community, a parent can work and survive and
combat loneliness." But even with the King familys
strong bonds, when their "reverses piled up one after
another, they had no defense."

A conservative reader might find that The Working Poor
validates an "individual responsibility" perspective on
the causes of poverty, for Shiplers narratives include
examples of the ways in which teens having babies out of wedlock,
poor parenting, and drug and alcohol abuse contribute to poverty.
But Shipler avoids a simple blaming-the-individual framework.
Rather he shows how individual circumstances and choices interact
with larger social forces to keep people poor. As he writes early
in the book, for practically every family "the ingredients
of poverty are part financial and part psychological, part
personal and part societal, part past and part present. Every
problem magnifies the impact of the others, and all are so
tightly interlocked that one reversal can produce a chain
reaction with results far distant from the original cause. A
run-down apartment can exacerbate a childs asthma, which
leads to a call for an ambulance, which generates a medical bill
that cannot be paid, which ruins a credit record, which hikes the
interest rate on an auto loan, which forces the purchase of an
unreliable used car, which jeopardizes a mothers
punctuality at work, which limits her promotions and earning
capacity, which confines her to poor housing."

For a reader looking for theoretical analysis or a
comprehensive program to eliminate poverty, The Working Poor
will be unsatisfying. Shipler could have done more to put
todays poverty in the context of growing wage and wealth
disparities, deepening our understanding of the structural
economic changes impacting workers at the bottom. A worker trying
to rise out of poverty in todays economy faces different
challenges than a worker in 1955 when advanced training was not
required to land good-paying jobs in U.S. manufacturing. Nor in
his brief discussion of solutions does Shipler hint that labor
unions and improved labor laws might play a role in enforcing a
social contract and raising wage standards.

These significant omissions tend to bias the conclusions
toward "fixing the individual" rather than working for
an economy that works for everyone, not just the very wealthy.
But the strength of The Working Poor is that it has the
poetry and power to move us, to deepen our individual and
national resolve to change the untenable and unjust conditions
that many of our neighbors endure.

Chuck Collins is co-founder of United for Fair Economy and
the co-author, with Bill Gates Sr., of Wealth and Our
Commonwealth: Why America Should Tax Accumulated Fortunes.